Akeelah and the Bee

Nov 8, 2011 — With the very first shots of Fanny and Alexander (1982), director Ingmar Bergman announces his perspective and signals his intentions. Here, we find the ten-year-old Alexander gazing into a puppet theater, lifting layer after layer of skillfully painted backdrop. We...

Oct 25, 2011 — It’s not a movie about how things were; it’s a movie about how things are remembered.

Oct 11, 2011 — A. E. W. Mason’s sweeping action novel The Four Feathers (1902) had already inspired three films by the time producer Alexander Korda got to it in 1939. It would be filmed three more times afterward. But you really haven’t seen it...

Oct 4, 2011 — Vilified, censored, banned, denied commercial distribution, and long unavailable, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s infamous film lives more in reputation and rumor than in memory.

Sep 23, 2011 — Performances Lillian Gish once said, “I’ve never been in style, so I can never go out of style.” The silent-screen legend was being modest, but she was clearly on to something—something that Charles Laughton grasped when he cast her as...

Aug 23, 2011 — Intimidation: The Weird Dream MakerImpassioned and dedicated craftsman of some of Japanese cinema’s biggest box-office successes and most eccentric off-genre sorties, longtime Nikkatsu studios mainstay Koreyoshi Kurahara (1927–2002) was a filmmaker with two opposite yet inseparable signature points of view....

Aug 18, 2011 — Stanley Kubrick’s labyrinthine 1956 heist flick The Killing—an exploded rethink of John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle and eventual template for the narrative convolutions of Reservoir Dog—became an instant facet in the jewel that was film noir, even as it refracted...

Feb 1, 2011 — When Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Véronique was first screened at Cannes, in 1991, the critical reception was rapturous. Georgia Brown declared in the Village Voice, “Anything I say about [the film] is merely a labored minuet danced around...

Feb 1, 2011 — This essay was originally published in the booklet accompanying the 2006 DVD release of The Double Life of Véronique. A new life experience is in the air today, a perception that explodes the form of the linear narrative and renders...

Jan 11, 2011 — His most personal film as well as the final one to deal with the German occupation of France, Jean-Pierre Melville’s thriller showcases human consciousness grappling with mortality.